Tomorrow Lingers: Catharsis
by Aconitum-Napellus
Summary: Spock/Chapel. After the miscarriage of their baby, Spock and Christine spend time on Vulcan to come to terms with the loss. TW for miscarriage/infant death/bereavement. Follows on from my earlier story 'Tomorrow Lingers.'


It had been a little over forty years ago that Ambassador Sarek had bought the little house on the shores of the K'Sahlin Sea, to please his human wife. In winter the air was cooler and fresher here than inland, and it was refreshing for a human used to the temperate climate of Earth to spend time in such a place. Spock, or the idea of a human-Vulcan partnership producing _any_ child, had barely been thought of at that point. There was only the one bedroom, and the most basic of facilities; or, at least, the most basic of facilities compared to the usual residence of the Ambassador of all Vulcan. There was, however, a comfortable sitting room that ran on into a kitchen diner, a spacious bedroom, and a bathroom with, in deference to Sarek's human wife, a large, oval bath.

The house was little used now. Sarek and his wife spent so much time off-world that there was little opportunity for beach holidays. The last time, a rare visit after many years of absence, was as Sarek recovered from emergency heart surgery performed by the chief medical officer of the _Enterprise_.

But now, as that hemisphere's winter gave way to a kind of spring, the place housed another recovering patient. The surgery that Christine Chapel had undergone may not have been surrounded by as much tension or drama as Sarek's, but it was certainly life-altering. The hurried removal by caesarean of a dead foetus was an almost unprecedented manoeuvre in modern medicine, but this time it had been absolutely necessary.

It had only been two weeks since her six-month-gestated child had died in the womb, and Christine felt like an empty shell. She was glad of the compassionate leave that she had been granted. She was glad of the peace and silence of this secluded cottage, and of the presence of nature and very little else. She felt an almost irresistible need to return to the basics of life – to prepare food, steadily, with her own hands, to wash herself slowly with a bathtub of water and a natural sponge, to step outside and to see nothing as far as her gaze fell but pulsing, orange-tinted seawater, and blowing sand, and rambling, alien plant life.

Above all, she was glad of the presence of Spock. The first fear, behind the wrenching grief of losing their child, was that in losing the baby she would also lose Spock. After all, they had come together only for the child. What was there now to prevent them from drifting apart? But she had underestimated the steadfast, slow-burning love and loyalty of a Vulcan heart. Spock had come to be with her because of the child, but he had stayed because of _her_.

His loyalty was perhaps even more remarkable now because of her fluctuating response to his presence. She didn't mean to shun him. She tried very hard not to; but at times she was barely aware that he was beside her. At other times he was all there was in the world, as his hot arms encircled her at night, holding her safe in her cradle of grief, or when he gently touched her cheek in the morning with his lips, and placed tea and some small breakfast pastry on the bedside cabinet, or when he sat beside her in the evening light in companionable silence, and rested his head against hers as if the grief exhausted him almost as much as it did her. But, often, she was a shell. She was in a shell, divorced from every other living thing, divorced from the wind that brushed her face and the feeling of sand on her feet, and even when he spoke she did not respond.

Right now was one of those times. She was aware, somewhere in the back of her mind, of his presence; but then she was always aware of his presence. It lingered in her mind like a half-forgotten thought. It was impossible, after the time that they had spent together and what they had shared, not to have formed a partial bond. Perhaps that was why sometimes she didn't notice his physical presence. When she was trapped behind her veil of grief it was hard to separate Spock in her thoughts from Spock in her actual presence, and when she felt like this she simply tuned both out.

She sat, tracing the contours of an alien seashell under her fingers, her eyes drifting on the undulating water. Vulcan had no tides, but it did have waves, and the rhythm of them was like a balm. This warm, alien, orange sea was a balm. She didn't think she would be able to bear Earth's blue sky and blue seas right now. Being on Vulcan had taken her away from everything she knew. No associations. No memories. No reminders of the natural processes of human life.

Spock.

Of course. She was suddenly aware of him again. His hand was touching her head, very lightly, but the touch was enough to jog her awareness of him, both physically and mentally.

'I'm sorry,' she murmured, looking up.

The hot sea breeze was ruffling his immaculate hair. He held a tray in one hand, which he placed beside her.

'You must eat,' he said in a kind but firm tone. 'Dr McCoy specifically instructed me to make sure that you take care of yourself.'

'Or that you take care of me?' she asked with an edge of humour, turning her eyes to the selection on the tray.

It was all good Vulcan food, all foods that she had evinced a fondness for, and all an anathema to her in this mood. Oh, how good it would be to be able to divorce herself from biology, and live on thoughts and air.

'No, you must eat,' Spock repeated firmly.

It was hard to get used to the fact that he sensed and interpreted the thoughts that floated on the surface of her mind.

'I will eat,' she promised him. She could sense the uppermost thoughts in his mind too. 'I know all of the medical reasons why I should eat.'

'I am sure that you do,' Spock nodded. 'You are extremely adept at your profession. However, there is also a social reason.'

She smiled, finally looking up to meet his eyes. They were, as ever, kind and concerned, and softened with what must be love. As ever, now that she had noticed his presence, she felt warmed by it, as if the sun had slipped out from behind a towering building.

'Thank you, Spock,' she said with a genuine smile.

He nodded, and sat down next to her on the sand. His feet were bare, she noticed, and his toes sank through the uppermost layer of super-heated sand without flinching.

'I'd like to be able to walk barefoot on the sand without burning,' she said regretfully.

Spock paused in sharing out the food, and looked at her.

'We must take a walk after sunset,' he said. 'It will be cooler then, and the beach is quite beautiful at night.'

She stared out over the water. She realised that Spock was holding out a small pastry parcel to her, and she took it, and bit into it absently.

'The grief will ease, eventually, Christine,' Spock said.

Flavour flooded out of the parcel. Ginger, tender Vulcan vegetables, and something sweet.

'Did you make these?' she asked in sudden surprise. 'Ginger isn't native to Vulcan, is it?'

'I did make them,' Spock nodded. 'And no, it is not native to Vulcan, but the local store stocks some exotic ingredients.'

'Oh,' she said.

She vaguely remembered him telling her this morning that he was going shopping, and then walking away from the house with a bag in his hand. He had been gone all morning. It was probably a relief for him to spend some time in normal society.

'What do they make of us in the village?' she asked curiously.

Spock lifted an eyebrow.

'The shop owner has known me almost since I was born, and they are quite familiar with my parents. This relationship is unusual, but quite accepted.'

'That's good,' she murmured.

She looked down at the tray. Without realising she had eaten her way through most of the food there.

'Oh, I ate your – ' she began.

Spock shook his head.

'I would rather that you ate it,' he said. 'There is plenty more in the house.'

She nodded, and stared out at the water again, thinking of her little ghost. Her little baby that slept in the house as they sat out here eating, that they pushed in a phantom pram as they walked beside the sea.

'Christine,' Spock said softly.

She blinked, watching an individual wave as it rushed toward her with a sense of inevitability, and shattered on the shore. The water had become her friend. It filled her mind when she was in danger of other thoughts crowding in.

Instinctively she wrapped her arms across her abdomen. The emptiness never failed to surprise her. Spock noticed her movement and put his arm around her shoulders, drawing her towards him, and she felt his comfort and sympathy and shared grief. It had taken Spock a lot of courage to expose the emotions that ran beneath his tight control. He had placed a very large amount of trust in her, and she had not let him down. She had never flinched from the intensity of his true feelings.

'Spock, do they have boats on Vulcan?' she asked suddenly.

Spock's eyebrow rose. 'Vulcan has its share of waterways,' he said. 'It is inconceivable to think that we would never have developed the boat.'

She shook her head. 'I never thought Vulcans wouldn't have developed the boat,' she said. 'Hell, you developed spaceships and warp drive. But – do Vulcans have boats that they use for fun? For relaxation? There can't be much need now for surface craft, what with transporters and skimmers and things.'

Spock tilted his head, considering.

'Pleasure crafts are not common,' he said, 'but it's a misconception to believe that simply because Vulcans are dedicated to logic that we never indulge in anything purely for the sake of relaxation. There must, somewhere on Vulcan, be boats available for such a pursuit.'

She smiled. 'I'd like to go out on a boat,' she said. 'I'd like to be surrounded by nothing but water.'

Spock shot her a concerned glance, and she laughed.

'Oh, Spock, I'm not considering drowning myself in the Vulcan seas,' she promised him. 'You must be able to tell that. I'm grieving. We both are. But – there is no logic in killing myself over it.'

A slight smile touched Spock's lips.

'I'm glad to hear that, Christine,' he said.

She could hear the gladness in his voice. He must be glad to hear her laugh, too. Today was the first day she had uttered such a sound since the death of the baby. As little as Spock may be inclined to laugh himself, she knew he was pleased by the happiness of others.

He touched his lips to her hair in a kiss. Instinctively he would have touched his fingertips to hers in a much more Vulcan expression of closeness, but he was wary of any contact at this time that might indicate a sexual desire.

'Oh, Spock,' she said softly, reaching out to his hand. 'I know you know I'm not ready. I'm not going to misinterpret anything.'

Very deliberately, she circled her fingertips upon his, and a sigh escaped him before he could repress it. She felt the surface of his thoughts in a vivid flash. Fire was licking at the edges of his consciousness. Humans – or most humans – had no idea of the intimacy of that gesture.

'I know,' she said, capturing his hand and raising it to her lips. 'I don't mean to tease. I'll keep it to human gestures of affection, if you like.'

'That might be wise,' he said.

She stared out over the water again, letting her thoughts drift away from the warm, stalwart presence beside her. With a tiring inevitability, with nothing to distract her but gently moving water, her thoughts moved back to _him_.

 _My little ghost… You bring me clumsily picked flowers and press them under my nose with a crooked grin. You sit on me in the morning, before I'm awake. You ask me for improbable sandwiches, and make me tie your scarf in a certain way, and are amazed at the first snowflakes you see…_

'Who is this child?' Spock asked her gently.

She looked at him, startled, unaware of how close to the surface her thoughts had been running.

'Who is this little boy?' Spock repeated. 'He is not ours. Where did he come from?'

She shook her head. 'I don't know… Children I've known, I suppose. I've known my fair share of little ones. They seem to come with the job. They gravitate towards me… At least, they did… But – he didn't want to stay with me…'

' _He_ did not want anything,' Spock reminded her softly. 'He had no choice in the matter, any more than you. He died. No one would choose that.'

'I – feel as if I'm missing a part of myself… My little dark-haired boy…'

Spock stroked his fingers lightly over her hair, and then placed his arm about her shoulders.

'It cannot help you, surely, to dwell on him like this…'

She laughed a short laugh. 'No, Spock,' she said tolerantly. 'It doesn't help me. But I don't _try_ to think of him. He just – comes walking into my mind…'

'A human mind is an unfortunate trouble,' Spock commented.

'Do you mean to tell me that you don't think of him, of what he could have been?' she asked.

Spock was silent for a while, then shook his head.

'No, I cannot tell you that,' he said honestly.

His fingers were touching hers, and she saw all of a sudden a smart, upright Vulcan boy, with dark, shining hair and dark eyes, and just a hint of Christine about the set of his jaw and the lines of his body.

Spock pressed his lips together, and that image was gone. All sense of his thoughts was gone.

'It serves no purpose to dwell on what might have been,' he said. He got to his feet. 'I will go make enquiries about that boat.'

She sat for a minute, listening to the soft sound of his footsteps on the sand, and then on the crunch of brittle gravel, and then on the softness of soil and plants. Then a door banged, and he was gone. It was a small sound in this big emptiness. She suddenly felt entirely alone.

She stood up and let her loose, long dress smooth out after so long sitting. She touched her hands over her abdomen. The scar from the caesarean was gone, of course. Scars were something of the past in most cases, and Dr McCoy had erased that one with his usual skill and care. But her womb had to return to its normal size naturally. There was nothing he could – or at least _would –_ do about that. Her belly still cramped, deep inside, as the hormone injections she had taken caused things to shrink back to normal, as if she had given birth normally, as if she had a baby inside the house, just sleeping, as if she were just grabbing a break in the exhausting first weeks of a child's life.

She stepped forward to where the waves curled on the sand. When they retreated the sand steamed and grew dry a moment before the next wave rolled in. She slipped off her thin shoes and stepped onto that little line of steaming sand. Cooled by the waves every so often, it was just bearable, but she stepped quickly forward again, going ankle deep into the water, then calf deep, then knee. It was a delicious feeling. The water was like a warm bath.

She stepped further in. The sand sloped so gently that the increase in depth was barely perceptible, but the waves came and washed up her legs, lifting and soaking the light fabric of her dress, then retreating and giving her a moment of cool as the slight breeze caught at the wet. She stepped on and on until the water was lapping at her thighs and the breaking waves were behind her. There was only the swell reaching up and dipping away, reaching up, dipping away again. Then the water was up between her legs, and a little cloud of blood swirled away like smoke. It didn't matter. There was no one to see. The water was stroking at her hips, reaching up over the slack pouch of belly that was so, so empty.

She stood there with the water just under her breasts, touching a hand to her skin through the dress, feeling that looseness, that emptiness. She could pretend he was in the house, sleeping. She could pretend that her baby was there, lips moving a little as he sucked in his sleep, hands loosely curled, thin eyelids shut over dark Vulcan eyes, little peaked ears deaf to the small sounds of the house around him.

It was like a knife stabbing up under her ribs and twisting. It came up through her throat, and she choked, and then she sobbed. It was a terrible thing to cry and cry and cry, and then to cry again. It was like wringing out a cloth and then finding it instantly needed wringing out again. It made her ache all through. It made her feel so empty, but so full of grief. How could a person be empty and full all at once? Illogical. How could a vessel be both empty and full?

She ducked down under the water and dragged forward with her arms, and she opened her eyes. All the water was a blur before her, tinted orange with the reflection of the sky and the sand. There were little flickering movements, little flashes. There were some Vulcan versions of fish in here, little scaled things glittering and flicking away. She reached out a hand and the glittering things slipped close, touched her fingers, and then darted away. There was nothing dangerous in here. Spock had assured her of that. Perfectly safe to swim, although most Vulcans didn't swim much.

 _It will be good for you,_ he had told her, when she had asked if she could swim. Everything was about what was good for her. Food that was good for her, and restful sleep, and gentle exercise. Everything was about helping her body and her mind recover. That was good, she supposed, but she thought over and over again of her baby, her little baby who was beyond help, beyond recovery. Why couldn't some of that solicitous attention have gone into making her baby live?

She surfaced in a blaze of anger, shaking water out of her hair, finding that she had moved so far underwater that she was completely out of her depth. It was stupid anger, stupid, formless, misplaced anger. Who was she angry at? McCoy? Spock? Herself? Was she angry at her baby for giving up that fight to come to term and be born? Maybe she was. But how could she be angry at _him_?

Stupid, formless anger. She wanted to scream and cry but she couldn't make a noise. Her face was wet anyway. Tears couldn't be told apart from the seawater on her face.

Everything that could have been done, had been done. McCoy had researched for hours to make the pregnancy a success. He had stayed up until the middle of the _Enterprise_ night just to call various people at times when they had been awake. He had pulled out all of the texts on Spock's gestation and worked through them with Spock, translating them out of the Vulcan with a Vulcan at his side to be sure that the translation was completely accurate. He had done _everything_. She had done everything. There had been nothing else she could do to make more of a chance of success.

And he had given up. He had died inside her, right where he should have been safest. Yes, she was angry at him. It was an awful realisation. She was angry at her poor, unformed, helpless baby for giving up despite all the care that everyone had lavished upon him. How _dare_ he do that? How dare he just give up, just decide he wasn't meant to be born, and die?

She let the thickly salty water bear her legs up to the surface, and she lay there, burning, the water steaming from her breasts and belly and thighs, steaming from the thin cotton of her dress. She was like Ophelia lying in the brook. She just needed someone to scatter flowers about her, and she needed to drown.

She almost laughed. How far was this from the bucolic England of Shakespeare's play? Supposed to be Denmark, but it was all England really. That brook, the overhanging willow, the daisies and pansies and violets and rue. It was Shakespeare's idyllic England, his own summer day.

She felt the alienness of this planet so very strongly all of a sudden. The orange sky arching above her, the salty water buoying her up, the small, bright, blazing sun. None of Vulcan's flowers were like Earth's soft gentleness. No wonder Amanda had a shaded place where she grew roses. Vulcan's flowers were fleshy and bright and hard, desperately protecting themselves against water loss. They never had to come up through late snows. They never felt the soft chill of a spring day. Vulcan hardly had a spring. The growing season was hot, like all the seasons.

What was she grieving for now? The baby, or Earth? It felt like so long since she had been to Earth. She didn't know if she could bear Earth, but she wanted it all the same.

She closed her eyes and floated. She didn't care where she might be drifting. There was hardly any current, anyway.

She had some sliver of self preservation left. She could feel the cotton of her dress growing stiff over her torso. It had been moulded by the water and now it was drying out, crisp with salt, like a kind of breastplate between her and the sun. But her face and arms and neck were exposed. The sunblock should protect her, but it never worked as well in water as it was supposed to.

She drifted herself back towards the soft sound of waves, just moving her arms in the water, letting her legs float like logs. A wave caught her and pulled her with sudden swiftness, drenching the stiffened front of her dress again, and self-preservation took over in force as she coughed water from her throat and turned herself over and crawled out onto the sand like a shipwrecked sailor.

She knelt there for a moment, dripping. The current had taken her further than she had expected. Her shoes were a hundred yards away. She walked back to them slowly, ankle deep in water so she didn't burn her feet on the sand, glad that Spock hadn't witnessed this half hour of such human self-indulgence. She came back to her shoes and slipped them on, and walked back towards the house. She was dry before she had left the sand.

((O))

The house was so suddenly cool after the blazing heat outside that for a moment she was dizzy. She couldn't see after the brightness outside. She stood there in the doorway, her back still heated by the sun, her hand on the door frame, just trying to make out the shapes in the room. Then there was movement; Spock coming out of another room, a light shape in loose white clothing, silent-footed on bare soles.

'I've put towels in the bathroom,' he said. 'The shower is set to cool.'

She smiled suddenly, almost laughed. Of course Spock had known that she was out there in the water. Of course he had looked out to check on her. She appreciated his non-interference as much as she would appreciate a candlelit dinner or bouquets of flowers. His trust in her sanity made her feel more sane.

'Thank you,' she said.

He came across the room and touched a hand to her arm, his fingers feeling cool for once against the heat her skin had absorbed. He leant and kissed her lightly on the cheek.

'Give me the dress and I'll put it through the fresher,' he said. 'There's another with the towels. Also underwear, and a fresh pad.'

'Thank you,' she said. 'I'll put it outside the door.'

She still felt a little self-conscious of nudity in front of him. It was such a strange situation. As Henoch he had seen everything, _done_ everything. It had been a dizzy whirlwind of seduction, of debauchery. Maybe that was why she felt self-conscious. That hadn't been Spock; not really. Spock's body, but not his mind. He had courted her so sweetly and so gently in the last weeks of her pregnancy, but he had stayed very clear of any sexual contact. They slept in the same bed here, but only slept, and she wore a light shift, and he wore underwear.

'I will impose nothing on you,' he had told her very clearly, and she was fine with that. Sex was the last thing on her mind.

She took off the salt-stiff dress and handed it out through the door, and Spock took it. The shower was beautiful and cooling, leeching the heat away from her head and shoulders, streaming down over her body. She felt a little more sane.

((O))

There were roses in a vase on the table. She stopped for a moment, said, 'Oh!' and Spock looked up from the computer where he was working.

'I had my mother send them over,' she said. 'I thought you would appreciate them. You've spoken of the brashness of Vulcan flowers.'

'Yes,' she said. ' _Yes_.'

She walked across the room and buried her nose in the soft scent of the petals. Had he picked up her thoughts about Ophelia's flowers? Had he realised that she was missing her home?

'Oh, they're beautiful,' she said.

She was almost crying. She found herself so close to crying with such ease at the moment. Anything could set her off.

'You must feel your distance from Earth right now,' Spock said. He had left the computer and come across the room to lay a hand on her shoulder.

'Have you been reading my mind?' she asked.

He gave a very slight smile, a little lift of the corner of his mouth.

'Nothing so crude,' he said. 'Nothing so direct. But you know that I pick up on your thoughts. I felt a yearning for the coolness of Earth and the modesty of Earth flowers, and I supposed that must be _your_ yearning rather than my own. I appreciate Earth flowers but Vulcan flowers are what are familiar to me. Yours seem so fragile in comparison.'

'Like humans?' she asked, echoing his half smile. 'Humans must seem so terribly fragile to you.'

'At times,' he acknowledged. 'Yes. I remember – ' Was that a laugh? The slight little rumble of a laugh? 'I remember being in an – an altered state, and fighting with the captain. It would have been so easy to break him; to kill him. Yes, humans do seem terribly fragile sometimes.'

'What if you _had_ killed him?' she asked curiously.

She was too diplomatic to ask Spock to which incident he was referring. There had been more than one, and he was ashamed of them all.

'If I had – I would have resigned my commission and submitted myself to the authorities,' Spock said simply.

She shook her head impatiently. 'I don't mean that. You _know_ I don't mean that. _You_ , Spock. What would it have done to you if you'd killed him? Your closest friend?'

He was silent, his mouth a little open. It was rare that Spock seemed lost for words rather than just as if he were composing a suitable reply in his mind. Then he said, 'I don't know, Christine. It is something I try not to dwell on.'

'You don't think about the future?' she asked.

'On the contrary. I think about the future a very great deal. Any sane, rational, intelligent person will think about the future. But that is very much an alternate future. A past future, if that makes sense. It is a future that would have occurred had I killed the captain, which by now would have passed into what was. There's no point in thinking about it.'

She thought about her baby, and that awful grief was there again, welling up like an unstoppable tide.

'There were so many things he could have been,' she said tearfully.

'No,' Spock said quietly, shaking his head. It hadn't taken any explanation. He knew instantly that she wasn't talking about the captain, but about their child. 'There were no other things he could have been.'

'If we'd done something different, if – '

It was so awful. It was so terrible. It was like a monster exploding up inside of her, taking over everything.

Spock's arms slipped around her and he held her in against his chest, one hand moving gently up and down her back, the other cradling the back of her head. Somehow the monster felt more contained. Somehow Spock was stopping it from ballooning to fill the room.

'We could not do something different, because we _did not_ do something different,' he said. ' _Kaiidth._ What is, is, Christine. One cannot change the past. It was never going to be any different.'

'It must be easier for you,' she said. 'It must be so much easier to know that there's nothing you could do – to have no regrets.'

'No,' he said solemnly, shaking his head. 'I – think sometimes it is very much harder. To – have no hope, no sense that things could have been changed. He is dead, and he always will be dead to me.'

She pressed her face in against his neck. It felt as if that would be so much easier. How much better it would be to not be filled with _what if_ s. How much better to not go over and over and over it again. If she had stuck more religiously to the diet McCoy had worked out, if she'd stopped working sooner, if she'd put her feet up every time someone had told her to. If, if, if…

'There's no right answer,' Spock said softly in her ear. 'Christine, there is no right answer. If one person had advised you to take more exercise and another had advised you to rest, which would be the right path to take? You are a medical professional. You know that there are always second, third, fourth opinions in a case like this. You know that no matter what medical science attempts to control, the living body is continually somewhat out of control. A biped walks by unbalancing himself for every step. You understand the metaphor, don't you? We try to control as much as we can, and we cloak ourselves in an illusion of control, but every movement into the future has an element of risk.'

'Don't you _miss_ him?' she asked.

She was, she knew, being so illogical, subjecting him to such a torrent of emotion. It was terrible of her to ask him if he missed his baby. Of course Spock missed him. She knew that. It was cruel of her, so cruel to needle him over this, but the question had come out of her mouth, and she couldn't pull it back.

'He wasn't yet a completely sentient being who interacted with me in a meaningful way,' Spock said, and she had the split second urge to pull back and slap him. 'But of course I miss him,' he continued. 'Not long before he died I felt his consciousness, Christine. I felt his mind. I don't dwell on all of the things that he'll never be, but please understand that I feel this loss more deeply than I can explain in words.'

'I know,' she said. Her voice was awful, muffled, loose with tears and lost against the side of his neck. Everything was lost and whirled up and distorted by grief. 'I'm sorry. I know...'

His lips pressed against her hair.

'The scent of your shampoo and the texture of your freshly washed hair are very pleasing to me,' he said.

She held her eyes tightly shut. Was that Spock's way of saying that she was wading too deep? Was she hurting him too much? He couldn't talk about it any more. She wanted to talk about it, she wanted so much, so deeply, to talk about it. But it was so easy to discount Spock's feelings entirely. He wasn't a sounding board. It was so hard to access and understand Vulcan emotions.

'Thank you,' she said, choosing to accept his surface compliment and all the deep things those words were covering. 'Thank you.'

'When I called Amanda about the roses she asked if she could come visit,' Spock told her. 'You're aware that I wasn't her first pregnancy?'

Dimly she thought back about all those anonymous medical texts that must have been referring to Sarek and Amanda, and eventually to Spock. Of course there had been mentions of the fear that conception would be impossible, and then when conception had been proven possible there had been details of miscarriages, mostly early, but one of them distressingly late. She had read those with a forced detachment, read them with her medical head on, not with the head of a pregnant woman desperate for her child to survive. She had tried not to visualise Amanda's face or body in all of those details.

'Yes, I suppose I was aware of that,' she said.

She wondered if she would be able to open up to Amanda about it. They had formed something of a bond that time on the to way to the conference at Babel. Amanda had been worried about Sarek. Christine had been worried about Spock. They had shared love and fear. But that had been such a brief time. There was something about Amanda that made her think of a queen. A gracious, sympathetic, beautiful queen, so far removed from ordinary mortals. But that was stupid. Spock would probably laugh at that thought, if he allowed himself.

Did she perhaps feel a jealousy towards Amanda? After all, _her_ pregnancy had come to term. She had Spock.

'Did they try again after they had you?' she asked curiously. 'Did your parents try for another baby?'

For a moment she felt the blankness in Spock. She felt him reaching into his memory and coming up with nothing.

'I don't know,' he said eventually. 'It's not something that my mother talks about very much. I think she found the whole process very painful, emotionally. If they did, it's not something that's noted in the medical texts.'

'Okay,' she said.

She felt calmer now, quieter, standing here with her face lost against Spock's neck and his hand gently stroking at her back. She felt suddenly exhausted.

'You should take a rest,' Spock told her. 'It's approaching the hottest time of the day and your body isn't acclimatised. Activate the air conditioning unit in the bedroom for once, and rest. Would you like me to contact Amanda and tell her that she can visit?'

'Yes,' Christine said. 'Yes, all right, I'll have a sleep. Yes, I'll put the air conditioning on. Yes, tell Amanda to visit.'

((O))

Catharsis was such a satisfying word. It sounded so pleasant in the mouth. No doubt there was a Vulcan word that was equally satisfying. They seemed to do those kind of words so well. What was it about _kaiidth_ that was so onomatopoeic? It sounded so final, but so accepting and graceful. So there was probably a Vulcan word meaning _catharsis_ that was perfect for its purpose, probably better than the English word. There was a lot about Vulcan 'mysticism,' as Leonard would call it, that would be helpful to humans if only they would embrace it, and the longer Christine spent here the more drawn she felt to explore it. No serious Vulcan Master would suggest a human fully embrace Vulcan discipline. Human emotions weren't as tumultuous as Vulcan. They didn't need so much taming. But there was a lot that could be gained from Vulcan ways of being.

It had been cathartic having Amanda in the house for a day. Yes, she did have the air of a queen, but only of the best kind of queen, the kind who cares for her subjects more than she cares for herself, and uses her advantages only to the advantage of others. It made Christine feel only briefly uneasy, in sudden moments, how much Amanda reminded her of herself. She thought only briefly about Oedipus relationships and then dismissed those thoughts. Plenty of men were drawn to women who reminded them of their mother. Spock would coolly deny it, she was sure, but it was there to be seen.

Amanda was very much more her own person than just Spock's mother. That last time on the _Enterprise_ Christine had looked on her almost solely as Spock's mother. Everything was in relation to Spock. But when Amanda talked about the time leading up to her final successful pregnancy and the heartache of all the failed attempts, Christine experienced the sudden epiphany of understanding Amanda as a woman in her own right, a girl who had grown up and taken the enormously courageous step of falling in love with a Vulcan man and relocating her entire life to another planet.

'Your mother really is an incredible woman,' she said to Spock in the quiet after Amanda had left.

'Yes,' Spock said, as if Christine had asserted that one add one equalled two.

'No, she is. I mean it,' Christine insisted. Spock's prosaic agreement suggested that he hadn't really considered his mother's life and her abilities as anything more than a given. Gravity exists on planets with mass. Photons are both particles and waves. Amanda is an incredible woman. 'Do you ever really think about everything she's been through?'

Spock sighed, and for a moment he reminded Christine forcefully of Sarek. _Attend, my wife…_

'I do not sit through meditation periods dwelling on my mother's life,' Spock admitted.

'Do you know how hard it must have been for her to give up her planet, everything she'd ever known, and make a new life on Vulcan? To marry a Vulcan man, and raise a Vulcan child?'

'My mother had travelled extensively off-world before her marriage to Sarek,' Spock commented.

A mother is a mother is a mother. Perhaps it was asking too much of Spock for him to step back and view her with different eyes.

'Spock, do you _appreciate_ the pain she went through before she had you?' Christine asked rather impatiently.

There had been so many tears when they had spoken, it had been like a clichéd girls' get together. There should have been hair rollers and marshmallows and girly vids playing on the screen that they only paid attention to every now and then. It had been all of that without the hair rollers and marshmallows and girly vids. There had just been talking and talking, and Amanda had cried for lost babies, her own and Christine's, and Christine had done the same.

'It's one of the strongest things you can do, having a child,' Christine said. 'I don't know if either of us were ready for it, but we would have managed it. Somehow people just manage. I don't – I don't know how to explain it. There's something in your mother, Spock; something in all mothers, that there just isn't in a woman who hasn't had a child. That there isn't in me...'

'If the only qualification is to have a child, then you have every potential of being able to fulfil that role,' Spock said logically, and she folded her hands over her abdomen, and ached.

It was like trying to explain God to an atheist. Spock was the most godless of atheists, and Christine could tell it would be almost impossible to remove that veil of Amanda's motherhood from Spock's eyes and have him see her as an individual being of incredible strength. Even if he thought he could see it, she didn't think he would actually be able to.

'Well,' she said, 'thank you for having her come over. It was good. I think it was good for both of us. I didn't really realise – I didn't think – that she's grieving too. It's brought up a lot of memories for her, and she's lost a grandchild.'

'Yes, of course,' Spock said.

He was closing down. She could see it on his face and hear it in his voice. _Sailing too close to the wind_ , she thought. Spock never liked to sail too close to the wind of his emotions.

She touched a hand to his, and for a moment she felt that incredible contact, that brief flash of everything that was in his mind, confused and bright and dazzling because it was everything at once, everything on the surface, all touching on her thoughts. It would take time, Spock said, before she would learn to control her response to all of that. It wasn't as simple as just narrowing one's eyes against the sun.

'I'm going for a little walk,' she said. 'I won't be long. I just need a bit of time to think.'

((O))

She thought, as she walked, about how strange and beautiful it was to love a Vulcan man. Spock would deny the 'man,' of course. He was male, but not a man. Being a man was admitting to his humanity. But in the vernacular, he was a man. She was sure that Sarek wouldn't object to being called a man, because he was one in every way that humans defined it. He had no need to defend his Vulcanness.

She looked along the curving shoreline. There was so little sound here. Just the gentle curling of the waves sinking onto sand, and the little scudding sound of sand in the breeze, the whisper of leaves in the breeze. The heat seemed to dampen everything, to make everything almost still. Even when Vulcans moved about they did so quietly, economically, efficiently. Efficiency didn't usually require shouting or violent movements.

They were like cats, the whole lot of them. Loving a Vulcan was like tending to an exotic cat. Impossible to understand completely, beautiful to look at, full of motives that were never quite explained, and that restrained expression of slight annoyance if anyone ever mentioned that Vulcans were impossible to understand, beautiful, and inexplicable. She barely knew Spock yet. She knew him the way one might know a ridged landscape by stepping from ridge to ridge. She was very familiar with the peaks of all of those ridges, but the dark valleys beneath were richer and more full than her mind could comprehend. Perhaps it was like seeing snowflakes, and then looking at them under a microscope to see the beautiful six-pointed structure, and then going deeper to see the form of H2O, and then going deeper still to the individual atoms, and the electrons and protons and neutrons within. So, Spock was a snowflake; a very solid, very unlikely-to-melt snowflake.

He was so much more complex than that. And oh, so beautiful. She felt the briefest flutter of desire, something that she hadn't really felt at all since – Oh, since before she lost the baby. That felt like so long ago. It felt like yesterday. Not long before then she had looked at Spock with such desire, such a strong desire, and she had seen a return of that feeling in his eyes. And when she had known his body under the control of Henoch… God. She had known it wasn't _Spock_ , but it was his body, all of his heat and power and strength. She had known it wasn't right, that Henoch was compelling her, but that body was Spock, all Spock.

That little flutter gave her hope. Perhaps that little spark would continue, would catch light one day. Perhaps the deep, knifing sorrow would start to retreat, to be less in her thoughts. Spock assured her that it would, and wasn't Spock so often right?

There was someone a little way along the coast. A Vulcan woman, she thought, although it was hard to tell at this distance. Someone standing waist deep in the water – _a cat in the water!_ her mind remarked – stooping and straightening and gathering something into a net. _Fishing_ was her first thought, but of course they wouldn't be fishing. Perhaps gathering some kind of native seaweed. Spock had said that the diet was a little different near the coast from what people ate inland. The difference couldn't be fish. Perhaps it was seaweed, and other shoreline plants. Those foods must be so rich in salt. A lot of the plants had adapted to the saltiness of the continually evaporating seas, but Vulcans were much like humans in their tolerance to salt. So perhaps there was a lengthy washing or soaking process to make them edible.

It fascinated her to think about the little homely tasks that these people must have performed for thousands of years. Vulcans as a whole seemed so removed from labour of the hands and the body, but that was because she had always encountered them out of their natural environment. Here they seemed as natural a people as a newly discovered tribe living off the land.

She thought of Spock living like that, wading into the sea, perhaps, and pulling out handfuls of plant matter. He hadn't been in the water since they had got here, although she knew that he could swim. Perhaps it was Spock, not Vulcans in general, who seemed divorced from manual labour. But since they had been here he'd disproved that, hadn't he? He'd walked to the village rather than taking the flitter, and he'd prepared food with his own hands, cooked it using heat and flame rather than programming a replicator. He had stood under the beading water of the shower rather than cleansing himself with sonics. Here by the sea there was water in plenty, provided easily by the solar powered evaporation chambers and pumps that every house possessed.

Maybe this was how Amanda had managed her long and successful marriage to a Vulcan. Living on Vulcan, living among the people, taught one that they _were_ just people. Their differences were just different, not strange.

She breathed in a long breath. There was so little oxygen in this air but the tri-ox shots she took every day helped with that, and she was able to reduce the dose a tiny amount every time. After a long while she would become acclimatised, like the high-altitude populations of the Andes on Earth. When she returned to Earth or Earthlike environments she would probably feel giddy with the oxygen richness. Even Spock struggled for a few hours when returning to Vulcan from the ship, although he would never let anyone know.

She couldn't fill her lungs quite as deeply as she wanted, but it was enough.

She turned back and saw the house in the distance, a little ochre-coloured shape blending in with the dusty landscape around. There was some kind of vine or creeper that had made its home up the side of the building, and it was blooming with vivid mauve flowers. She wondered if she could ever come to see a place like that as home. In a life with Spock, of course, her home was as likely to be on a ship as anywhere. But if she had a child? If her child had come to be born…

She folded her arms over her abdomen again. She felt so empty. She had grown used to the stretching inside her, the bouts of hiccups, the insistent push of hands or feet under her ribs. She had grown used to always carrying another being with her, a life that relied on her entirely.

The tears evaporated almost as soon as they were formed. She glanced towards the sea, where her face could be as wet as she liked and there was no telling if it were sea water or tears. It was too far, really, to swim back. Spock would be worried if she came in like that again, her dress dried out and stiff with salt. She had to consider Spock in all of this. He was grieving too.

It was a privilege, really, to be allowed to share that grief. She became aware at times of what a privilege it was that Spock allowed her into that private place. He was spending long hours in meditation at the moment, and although he didn't share his thoughts at those times she knew it must be in order to process what he had lost. She could sense his grief in the way he put his arm around her or touched her hand lightly when they sat together in silence, and the way his attention seemed to drift away at times. These were the signs to look for in a grieving Vulcan, she had come to realise; a greater attentiveness to others, and greater distraction from others. A quietness and an in-turned look. She was glad, shockingly so, to not be alone in her grief.

((O))

'There,' Spock said, gesturing towards the water.

She followed his outstretched arm, and saw a boat floating gracefully on the copper waters. It was obviously a boat, but it was of such an alien design that it appeared exotic and beautiful. The furled sail was constructed of some fabric that was so light that it shimmered with iridescence at the softest breeze. The shape of the hull, presumably designed with pure logic, was a graceful arc of moulded wooden planks of almost the same copper hue of the sea it sat upon, licked with reflected ripples from the water below.

'It's beautiful,' she murmured, transfixed by the sight. 'It's nothing like our boats…'

'It is designed to be easily controlled by one person alone, if necessary. It's not very big, but – '

'It's perfect,' she smiled. 'Absolutely perfect. What a beautiful thing…'

It reminded her of solar ships she had seen from the _Enterprise_ portholes, drifting in the silence of vacuum, propelled by the solar winds. There was something so amazingly alien about it, but so natural.

'Can we go out in it now?' she asked, because the afternoon was fading into evening, and it would be dark in a few hours.

'That was my intention,' Spock nodded.

'How do we get out there, though?' she asked, suddenly practical.

Spock's lips quirked upwards, and he raised a stick-like device in his hand. He touched a button and the boat began to move closer to the shore.

'A remote control boat?' she asked.

She laughed suddenly. It seemed so beautifully ridiculous. She was laughing out of all proportion to the actual situation, and Spock looked at her with concern.

'Christine?' he asked.

She pressed a hand against the curve of her ribs.

'I'm sorry. I don't know why I'm laughing so hard. It's just – it looked so natural, so far away from modern technology. But you're bringing it in with a remote control.'

'It's only logical for the craft to have some form of propulsion other than the sail,' Spock pointed out gravely.

'Yes, of course,' she said, calming herself. 'Of course it is.'

'You _will_ have to get your legs wet,' he cautioned her. 'It won't come in that far.'

'I don't mind,' she promised, and she hitched up the hem of her dress and smiled to prove that she was ready to wade.

Spock nodded in approval. There wasn't much he could do about his light trousers. He waded into the water without touching them, and stood with a hand on the hull, steadying the craft as Christine clambered aboard. It rocked as he joined her, and she smiled at him in sudden excitement.

'It must be years since I've been on a boat,' she said. 'I must have been – Gosh, I think I must have been in my twenties, on Lake Erie. So long ago...' There she was, missing blue skies and cool wind again. She seemed to flip flop between being glad of Vulcan's strangeness, and so desperately wanting home. Suddenly she wondered, 'Have you ever been on a boat, Spock?'

'I have,' he confirmed, then he added with a bright twinkle in his eyes, 'I was in my twenties; twenty-three and four months, to be more precise, on Lake Ontario. My mother's idea.'

'Wow,' she said softly.

How strange that seemed. Spock, on the Great Lakes in a boat, around the same time that she had enjoyed that vacation at the lakes.

She had hardly registered that the boat was moving, but suddenly the shore was far away, and all around them was the softly lilting water, a copper pool reflecting a copper sky. The beach was a thin line of reddish sand, the house almost gone in the tumble of rocks and vegetation and the rising contours of hills beyond. In the far distance were mountains, and she thought there was snow on the very peaks.

'Is that snow up there?' she asked, and Spock turned.

'Yes,' he said. 'There's often a very small amount of snow or ice on the highest peaks. Not a lot because the moisture content of the atmosphere is so low, and it falls so rarely, but what does fall tends to stay.'

'It must be nice up there,' she said rather wistfully.

'You would not be able to breathe,' Spock replied.

'Oh,' she said. 'Oh. Well, that would dampen the atmosphere.'

'If the atmosphere were dampened, there would be more snow,' Spock said, and Christine understood that, in his deadpan, level-voiced way, he had made a joke. She laughed, and saw that he was gratified.

'This pleases you,' he said, gesturing around at the boat and the spreading water.

'Oh, _yes_ ,' she said with feeling. 'Yes, it really does. I feel so – so at peace. It's beautiful out here, and a little cooler.'

She trailed a hand into the water, then drew it out and tasted the salt on her fingers. She had never been to the Dead Sea on Earth, but she imagined that this must be what it was like; except for the colour of the sky and its reflection in the water.

'I brought food, and a good supply of water,' Spock said, 'so we can stay out for some time. We don't need to return until morning, if you so desire.'

'We can _sleep_ out here?' she asked, staring at him. 'Really? Oh, that would be perfect!'

'It will be cooler than the house, at any rate,' Spock said, and she smiled.

'I hope you brought yourself some wraps.'

'There are blankets as well as provisions of food and water,' Spock nodded.

'Then you had this all planned?'

'I always plan ahead,' Spock said. If he were a human he would sound smug, but she knew he was just speaking fact.

'It's fun to be spontaneous sometimes,' she said.

'It is more fun to be equipped with enough water to prevent death from dehydration,' he countered.

'Of course,' she replied.

She found a space against the curve of the hull and lay back, finding the wood quite soft enough to make her feel extremely comfortable. Spock began letting the sail out above her, and she watched as it rippled in the wind, little rainbows being sent through the fabric with every movement.

'This is bliss,' she said after a long time.

She wasn't sure how long she had lain there, gazing up at the sail and sky, but the heat was a little less than before, and the sky had grown darker.

'Did I fall asleep?' she asked.

Spock was standing at the prow like a figurehead, looking out over the water. He had taken his shirt off, she realised as he turned, and was standing there barefooted in his light trousers and nothing else.

'Yes, you fell asleep,' he confirmed.

'Where are we?' she asked, sitting up a little, blinking. She couldn't see the shore.

'Only nine kilometres out from the shore,' Spock told her. 'We have been travelling due west. If it were lighter, you'd be able to see the mountains still.'

'Then we're going to stay out all night?' she asked. It seemed like a given.

'If that's what you desire,' Spock nodded.

He let go of a rope he had been holding and settled down to join her on the boards. He sat cross legged, delved into a bag, and brought out a fruit which he twisted and split into two. Juice welled, and dark green seeds peppered the broken orange surface. He held out one half to her, and she took it. It was so sweet and cool that saliva gushed into her mouth as she tasted it.

'Oh, that's perfect,' she said.

' _Ni-jah_ ,' Spock replied. 'They grow somewhat further inland. My mother is also very fond of them.'

'Are they naturally so chilled?'

His mouth quirked. 'There is a cool pack in the bag. They taste best when cold. It reduces the odour.'

'I hadn't even noticed an odour.'

'And that is the point,' Spock nodded. 'Warm, they can be off-putting.'

'So refreshing,' she murmured.

She sat there with her bitten half cupped in her hand. She thought of Adam and Eve, and the unleashing of forbidden fruits. Then she thought of this pear-shaped thing as a pear-shaped womb, and she saw the seeds as babies sheltered within, and suddenly she felt so strange. There was that emptiness again. It came over her so abruptly at times. She forgot it all, forgot she had ever been anything but herself, an autonomous being. Then she remembered how she had been carrying another life, and that life was gone.

'Christine,' Spock said. As always, he had sensed the change in mood.

'I know,' she said. 'I'm sorry.'

'No,' he replied. 'There is nothing for which to apologise. You are processing your grief in the only way that you can.'

'Yes,' she said. 'Yes, I suppose… I suppose I am. But – ' She could feel tears stinging in her eyes. She was letting the grief take control. 'Oh, Spock, I miss him so much. I never even knew him, I never held him, and I miss him so much. I miss what he was going to be...'

'I know,' Spock replied.

'And then – ' The words were tumbling out, all the feelings ballooning again, so hard to process and control. 'And then – I think about the future. Do you ever think about that, Spock? I imagine having another child. Oh god… I – I – don't know what to think. I want – something to hold, something to have in my arms and to love and to watch grow. But – it can't be him. Is that betraying him, to want someone to replace him? I mean, I know it's too soon anyway. Far too soon. But – one day – '

Spock's hand was touching her face, his fingertips on her temple and forehead. She could feel him, a warmth and a steadiness just touching her mind, like a mental hug. Slowly those chaotic feelings started to settle. They didn't go away, but they settled until it was easier to see them for what they were.

'One day,' he said softly.

He leant closer and very lightly left a kiss on her lips. Such a small, brief kiss, not even there for long enough for her to respond. She found herself with her lips parted, wanting to return the kiss, but his mouth was gone.

'One day?' she echoed. 'You – ?'

'One day. We will plan for this, and we will take advantage of medical intervention from before the point of conception. This can be done, Christine. You studied the records. One takes the most viable genetic material from both parents. Very little is left to chance. The entire genome on both sides is scanned and potential weaknesses are discarded.'

'You make the perfect child,' she murmured. 'Is that what _you_ are?'

'So my mother has been known to tell people,' Spock replied, and she felt his humour through the touch of his fingertips. 'But no, Christine, not in the sense that you mean. This is not a construct. It's not something created outside of nature. It is just the most viable genetic material. It is saving the parents – you and me – from suffering the grief that we have suffered. It isn't a certainty that a foetus developed in this way will survive, but the odds are so much greater. They are already greater than those of my parents, because I am more similar, genetically, to you. I am more human than my father.'

'Another child,' she said.

She rested a hand on her abdomen, feeling the looseness of the skin, the emptiness. She was wet with blood between her legs, still bleeding for the child that had died before he left the womb. It felt right, somehow, to go on bleeding like that for him, but if only it could be her sacrifice in honour of his life, not his death…

'In time,' Spock said, 'if that is what you wish.'

'And what you wish,' she said, making it more of a question than a statement. 'Do you wish it, Spock? You didn't plan for any of this. A child is – Well, it's such an upheaval.'

'It's impossible to plan for everything in life,' he said. He gave a little sigh. 'The _Enterprise_ only has a few more years of its five year tour of duty. You've sometimes expressed a desire to spend more time on Earth.'

'Not Vulcan?' she asked. 'Wouldn't you want a Vulcan child to be raised on Vulcan?'

'I would want a Vulcan child to be raised by its mother,' he said. 'There are plenty of Vulcans on Earth who would assist in the mental development of our child. There are Vulcan schools there. Vulcan is not the centre of the galaxy, no matter how much some of my people would like to imply that it is.'

'You've thought about this, haven't you?' she said. 'You've thought about it a lot. More than me, probably.'

'It is in my nature to think,' Spock replied. 'I had thought, Christine, that perhaps when the ship's tour of duty was over I would return to Vulcan and focus on discipline. There are paths that we can take, and after opening my mind to the experiences of this quadrant of the galaxy I thought I might explore what it means to be Vulcan more deeply. Perhaps even take the Kolinahr.'

'The – ' The breath caught in her lungs. _Spock_ , take the Kolinahr? That was the Vulcan equivalent of becoming a monk.

'I had considered it,' Spock said. 'But no matter how much one plans, no one can predict the future. It could be that I dedicate the years it would have taken to achieve Kolinahr to a far more emotional – a far more human – pursuit. Having a wife, Christine, and children. After all, I'm sure an experience like that would be equally illuminating in my exploration of my own mind.'

She really did catch his humour that time. 'Are you saying children will send you mad?' she asked.

'I don't fear insanity. Perhaps that they will test my mental composure,' Spock countered.

'Are you saying you want to have a child with me, Spock?' she asked then, hardly daring to sound the words out into the darkening evening.

'I thought that was a given,' he replied.

'Oh,' she said.

The silence expanded. There was the lapping of the water against the sides of the boat, and the occasional flap of the sail, but the wind had all but died with the dusk. She moved a little, and Spock put his hand under her head and guided her movement so that she found herself lying with her head against the softness of his torso. His fingertips moved gently through her hair. Above them, the sky darkened until all the air was blackness, and stars pricked the night, more dazzling and steady than any stars seen through Earth's thick atmosphere.

'Oh, how beautiful,' she murmured.

'That is Sol, there,' Spock said, pointing, and she followed the line of his finger to a dim little stud of light.

'It seems so far away.'

'It is so far away,' Spock said, 'but quite reachable.'

'Are we going to go there?' she asked. 'I mean, are there plans for the _Enterprise_ to pass by any time soon?'

'In the next few months, I believe,' Spock told her. 'The plans aren't entirely fixed. Everything is subject to change.'

'Of course,' she sighed.

'When we do visit Earth I'm certain the captain will grant shore leave,' Spock said. 'It is also possible that when it comes time for us to rejoin the ship we will have to pass by Earth to rendezvous with the _Enterprise_ , depending on where it is at that point in time.'

She smiled. It was always hard to work out how to rejoin a constantly moving ship. It would be so nice if they could pass by Earth.

She hummed a few bars of music. _When you wish upon a star, makes no difference who you are. Anything your heart desires will come to you…_ Her low humming sounded so small under that vast, dark sky.

'It is better to create what you wish, rather than simply hope,' Spock said, and she felt the vibration of his voice through his warm skin.

'Yes,' she said, and her thoughts drifted on how Spock had known what she was humming, how he had known the lyrics. Had his mother shown him old animations when he was a child, or was it just part of his huge stock of obscure knowledge?

The stars above her were so bright now that they were almost dazzling. It was like looking at them from the ship, through the vacuum of space. They drifted above her, seeming to expand and dwindle, coming close and then seeming so, so far away.

'You are falling asleep,' Spock said, but his voice was as far away as the stars. They were so beautiful up there, so distant and bright and all around her. She saw them as everyone she had ever loved. That bright one there was grandpa, and grandma was with him, whirling about him, just ever such a little less bright. There was Roger, bright, so bright, so large she could almost reach up and touch him. There was Elaine. It had been such a strange, odd surprise to hear of her school friend's death at such a young age. And who were the rest? Maybe they were all of humanity, all of the Vulcan elders, the sky so full of all of those souls that it was on fire. There, right above her, small and glittering; that was her baby, was their baby, floating there above them in the vastness of space. Always there. He would always be there, up above her.

She was so sleepy she could hardly make her lips move. Maybe she had been asleep. There was a little chill in the air, but there was something warm over the top of her. She must have been asleep.

'W'star's that?' she murmured. She wasn't even sure if she were pointing, but Spock knew where she was looking. Of course he knew.

'Aldebaran,' Spock said.

'Aldebaran,' she echoed. So that was him, maybe. That was their child, up there, floating as a burning point of light. Perhaps she could always look to Aldebaran.

'Go back to sleep,' Spock said. 'I will take care of the boat.'

He would, she knew. He would take care of the boat, just as he was taking care of her. Perhaps they would drift all night under the light of those stars, kept safe by the light of those stars, the lights of all the people she had ever loved. He would guide the boat and keep them safe, long through the night. He would rouse her when the light returned, and they would go home.


End file.
